Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Mining History of Gamification Towards Finding Expertise in Question and Answering Communities: Experience and Practice with Stack Exchange

  • Published:
The Review of Socionetwork Strategies Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Recently, an online Q&A tool has become an essential part of individual communities and organizations of experts on specific topics. Using the answers to questions about specific topics will help such communities work more efficiently in their fields. Currently, Q&A online communities are adopting gamification to engage users by granting awards to successful users. In this paper, we investigate how to mine award achievement histories to find expertise. We propose the use of sequence analysis and clustering techniques. Specifically, we study the history of Stack Exchange, a large Q&A community that employs gamification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of using award achievement history to find expertise in Q&A communities.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Begel, A., DeLine, R., Zimmermann, T.: Social media for software engineering. The Proceedings of the FSE/SDP workshop on Future of software engineering research. 33–37, 2010

  2. Nasehi, S., Sillito, J.: What makes a good code example?: A study of programming Q&A in StackOverflow. The Proceeding of the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM). 25–34, 2012

  3. Ponzanelli, L., Bacchelli, A., Lanza, M.: Seahawk : Stack Overflow in the IDE. The Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering. 1295–1298, 2013

  4. Harper, F. M., Raban, D., Rafaeli, S., Konstan, J.A.: Predictors of Answer Quality in Online Q & A Sites. The Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 865–874, 2008

  5. Gottipati, S., Lo, D.: Finding relevant answers in software forums. The Proceedings of the 2011 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. 323–332, 2011

  6. Lerner J., Tirole J.: Some simple economics of open source. The Journal of Industrial Economics. 50(2), 197–234 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Morris, M. R., Teevan, J., Panovich, K.: What Do People Ask Their Social Networks, and Why ? A Survey Study of Status Message Q & A Behavior. The Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1739–1748, 2010

  8. Deterding, S., Sicart, M., Nacke, L., O’Hara, K., Dixon, D.: Gamification. Using gamedesign elements in non-gaming contexts. The Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2425–2428, 2011

  9. Grant, S., Betts B.: Encouraging User Behaviour with Achievements: An Empirical Study. The Proceedings of the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories. 65–68, 2013

  10. Jurczyk, P., Agichtein, E.: Discovering authorities in question answer communities by using link analysis. The Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Conference on information and knowledge management. 919– 922, 2007

  11. Kao, W.-c., Wang, S.-w.: Expert Finding in Question-Answering Websites : A Novel Hybrid Approach. The Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing 867–871, 2010

  12. Pal, A., Farzan, R., Konstan, J. A., Kraut, R. E.: Early Detection of Potential Experts in Question Answering Communities. The Proceedings of the 19th international conference on User modeling, adaption, and personalization. 231–242, 2011

  13. Raj, N., Dey, L., Gaonkar, B.: Expertise Prediction for Social Network Platforms to Encourage Knowledge Sharing. The Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 01. 380–383, 2011

  14. Anderson, A., Huttenlocher, D., and Kleinberg, J.: Steering User Behavior with Badges. The Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web. 95–106, 2013

  15. Sinha, V. S., Mani, S., Gupta, M.: Exploring Activeness of Users in QA Forums. The Proceedings of the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software. 77–80, 2013

  16. Gabadinho A., Ritschard G., Muller N.S., Studer M.: Analyzing and Visualizing State Sequences in R with TraMineR. Journal of Statistical Software. 40(4), 1–37 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Hoaglin, D.C., Mosteller, F., Tukey, J. W.: Understanding Robust and Exploratory Data Analysis. Wiley Classic Library Edition, 2000

  18. Ward J. H.: Hierarchical grouping to optimize an objective function. Journal of the American Statistical Association. 58(301), 236–244 (1963)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Ichikawa, K., Hak-Sing IP, E., Yada, K., Washio, T.: Application of DNA Sequence Alignment Algorithm to Classification of Shopping Paths through a Supermarket. The Proceeding of the 2011 SIAM International Workshop on Data Mining for Marketing. 37–42, 2011

  20. Elzinga, C. H.: Sequence Analysis: Metric representations of categorical time series. Department of Social Science Research Methods, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Technical Report, 2008

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, 8916-5 Takayama, Ikoma, 630-0192, Nara, Japan

    Patanamon Thongtanunam, Norihiro Yoshida, Kohei Ichikawa & Hajimu Iida

  2. Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University, 1-1 Yamadaoka, Suita, Osaka, 565-0871, Japan

    Raula G. Kula

Authors
  1. Patanamon Thongtanunam
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Raula G. Kula
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Ana E. C. Cruz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Norihiro Yoshida
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Kohei Ichikawa
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Hajimu Iida
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Patanamon Thongtanunam.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Thongtanunam, P., Kula, R.G., Cruz, A.E.C. et al. Mining History of Gamification Towards Finding Expertise in Question and Answering Communities: Experience and Practice with Stack Exchange. Rev Socionetwork Strat 7, 115–130 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12626-013-0038-0

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12626-013-0038-0

Keywords

Search

Navigation